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Any way to turn off second HDD in MBP(Superdrive conversion)?

A

apw100

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 24, 2010
134
1
Jacksonville, FL
I want to replace the Superdrive on my MBP with an additional hard drive. I would really rather have an extra drive in my MBP instead of having to bring an external one with me. This drive will be used mostly for a scratch disk for Photoshop, file storage for FCP video and sound samples.

Is there any way to turn the drive off when I dont need to use it so that my battery life won't take a hit?
 
What about just telling the OS to let the drive sleep when not in use? There would be a slight delay if you tried to access the drive but that's better than hassle of mounting/unmounting.
 
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I would think an AppleScript should be capable of doing this. I am very interested in this since i just installed a 160GB G2 Intel SSD in my new i7 15" MBP and moved the 500GB HDD to the optical bay. If anyone has done this or can point me in the right direction I would greatly appreciate sharing any info you might have.
 
would love to have a second hard drive in a MBP. Then again I am not comfortable with altering my computers internals (being thats its apple product). Besides I am approaching 5 tb of data, so where would another 2.5" drive really get me...
 
I have created two Automator applications that will mount/unmount the hard drive and then reflect that in Growl. You just need to open the applications in Automator and change the name of the volume that you want to mount/unmount and then change the description in Growl statement.

Automator apps for mounting and unmounting apps

These were just something quick that I worked up. I am sure that the apps can be improved on and am welcome to improvements/suggestions. One improvement I would like to see is some sort of verification.
 
I too am looking for a way to "force sleep" my HDD when I don't use it. Any new ideas on this?
 
designs216 said:
What about just telling the OS to let the drive sleep when not in use? There would be a slight delay if you tried to access the drive but that's better than hassle of mounting/unmounting.
Click to expand...

This is what I do - works like a charm. The time spent waiting for the disk to spin up is negligible, but then again, I only use the disk to store movies/music/photos. When prices drop though, I'll likely upgrade my primary drive to a 512GB SSD and get rid of the platter drive altogether.
 
Just set it in settings>energy saver

Just set it in settings>energy saver
 

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brand said:
I would think an AppleScript should be capable of doing this. I am very interested in this since i just installed a 160GB G2 Intel SSD in my new i7 15" MBP and moved the 500GB HDD to the optical bay. If anyone has done this or can point me in the right direction I would greatly appreciate sharing any info you might have.
Click to expand...

brand, its 404 now. do you have a new link? thx
 
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